Counterfactual Thought in Dreams

Counterfactual cognitive simulations are considerations of what might have been if what actually happened could be undone. I hypothesize that counterfactual thought is characteristic of dreams and that cognitive operations in dreams function to identify a norm violation recorded in autobiographical memory and then to re-instate normality in memory by generating counterfactuals to the violation. Dream counterfactuals therefore obey the same constraints on mutability as waking counterfactuals. Both dreaming and counterfactuals typically focus on the self, involve negative affect, and narrative form, promote problem solving and learning by running mental simulations and variations on a given problem theme, employ memory fragments in these various mental scenarios, plausibly rely on neural networks in right limbic and orbitofrontal cortices, and are largely automatic and pre-conscious operations.     

Dreams in the History of Philosophy

For 2,500 years western philosophers showed great interest in dreams—as subjects, examples, analogies, and contexts. Since 1960 this interest has declined, while scholars in other disciplines continue to study dreams, often addressing philosophical issues. The history and the current dialogue invite philosophers to reinvigorate their study of dreams. This essay develops these observations about the philosophy of dreams by focusing on its history, briefly noting its recent decline, and closing with comments about its future.     

Object Representations in Dreams of Chicanos and Anglos

The relationship between the cultures to which persons belong and their internalized object representations as revealed by manifest dream content was investigated. It was hypothesized that because Chicanos are from a more nurturing culture than Anglos, they would represent persons in their dreams as more differentiated, articulated, and integrated, with more benevolent interactions. 50 Chicano and 50 Anglo university students (25 of each gender in each culture) reported a total of 555 dreams that were scored according to the Concept of the Object Scale (Blatt, Brenneis, Schimek & Glick, 1976). The Scale applies developmental principles concerning the three dimensions of differentiation, articulation, and integration to the study of human responses given to the Rorschach. This research applied the Scale to the manifest content of the subjects' reported dreams. The cross-cultural hypothesis was disconfirmed; however, there were strong findings concerning gender. Gender differences across culture were statistically significant in each developmental dimension, ranging from females representing more humans, who are better articulated and more benevolently interactive (p < .01) to females reporting more intentional, congruent actions and more interactions (p < .05). The only cross-cultural finding was that Anglos represent more action in their dreams than Chicanos (p < .05). Within the sample of acculturated Chicano subjects, genders were polarized to a much greater extent than in the Anglo sample. Implications of the findings for theoretical understanding of gender and cultural differences in object representations are discussed.     

Incidence of Threat in Dreams: A Response to Revonsuo's Threat Simulation Theory.

A. Revonsuo (2000b) proposed an evolutionary theory of dreaming, stating it is a threat simulation mechanism that allowed early humans to rehearse threat perception and avoidance without biological cost. The present study aimed to establish the proportion of dreams containing physical threats to the dreamer, whether these represent realistic life-threatening events, and whether the dreamer successfully and realistically escapes. It also examined incidence of threatening events in real life. A sample of most recent dreams was collected (N = 401). Only 8.48% of dreamers reported realistic life-threatening events in dreams and a realistic escape subsequently occurred in only one third of these reports. Actual severe life-threatening events were experienced by 44.58% of the sample. These findings contradict key aspects of Revonsuo's theory. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Contextualizing Images in Dreams and Daydreams

A contextualizing image (CI) is a powerful central image of a dream which appears to contextualize (provide a picture-context for) the dreamer's emotion. For instance, dreamers who have experienced any serious traumatic event sometimes dream, I was overwhelmed by a tidal wave. This appears to picture their feeling of terror and/or vulnerability.A scoring system for CIs is examined here and is applied to dreams and daydreams supplied by 40 students. Two raters scoring dreams on a blind basis showed good inter-rater reliability. Recent dreams were shown to have more as well as more intense CIs than recent daydreams; likewise, dreams that stand out had more intense CIs than daydreams that stand out. Students with thin boundaries had more and more intense CIs than students with thick boundaries in their recent dreams and nightmare, but not so clearly in dreams and nightmares that stand out. The emotions judged as contextualized by the powerful images tended towards fear/terror and helplessness/vulnerability in dreams (especially in dreams that stand out) whereas emotions contextualized by images in daydreams showed a wide range with no clusters.     

The Phenomenology of True Dreams in Maimonides

Maimonides' conception of true dreams posits an important role for the faculty of imagination within the growth of the intellectual self. However, unlike many modern theories of the dream, Maimonides requires one to subject the imagination to intellectual processes, in order to be able to harness the imagination for the practical knowledge. The imagination found in the dream images consists of objective graded levels based on the purity of the imagination from desire and the use of the intellect. The content of the dream is new piece of knowledge, a solution, a political agenda, or a vision for the future that needs to be contextualized within one's own life. Maimonides emphasizes the image as an intellectual object, specifically a single object and not the event. For Maimonides dreams do not give supernatural content nor are true dreams a universal part of daily life. They are extraordinary and do not have presentational immediacy.     

Children's Dreams and Nightmares: Emerging Trends in Research.

New manifest content analysis research on children's dreams and nightmares provides insights into how dreaming reveals developmental changes over time. Five culturally diverse research studies were conducted with varied methods for dream collection that included laboratory-collected dreams, as well as written journals, audiotaped dreams, and retrospectively recalled dreams. As children grow older, they are more able to recall dreams, dream narratives increase in length, and dreams are characterized by decreasing levels of passive victimization and have more elaborate character interactions. Age and gender differences in recall, interactions, and gender of dream characters indicate that dream research is a fertile area for studying child development and the changing function of dreams over time. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Working with Dreams in Psychotherapy: The Therapists' Perspective

129 therapists completed a 70-item questionnaire about working with dreams in psychotherapy. Almost all therapists (92%) worked with dreams in psychotherapy at least occasionally. Therapists reported that 15% of clients had brought dreams into therapy during the past year. Therapists engaged more in exploratory than insight- or action-oriented activities when working with dreams. They were more likely to work on dreams with clients who had troubling dreams or who were interested in working on dreams, but were unlikely to work on dreams with schizophrenic or psychotic clients. Those clinicians who were more likely to work with dreams had more training, higher estimated dream recall, more positive attitudes toward dreams, and did more personal dream work than clinicians who were not likely to work with dreams.     

Dreams in medieval Saints' lives: Saint Francis of Assisi.

Reading the earliest biographies of St. Francis of Assisi, one notices the significant part dreams play in his life. They appear during crucial stages of his life. This fact encourages us to pay special interest to Francis' dreams, but not in the strict sense of the word: Several situations in which Francis gains clarity of his life and grows spiritually through images (dreams, visions, parables) are to be included. Francis and his biographers were men of images, and it is necessary to understand the language of these images. In this way, by analyzing the dreams of this saint, the authors come to understand the medieval interpretation of dreams, revelations, and visions in general. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Dreams and Visions in the Anglo-Saxon Conversion to Christianity.

Dreams and visions were reported to be powerful agents of change in the 7th-century conversion of Anglo-Saxon England to Christianity. They were presented as instrumental in the introduction and integration of this new religious/cultural paradigm. These dreams and visions combine Anglo-Saxon and Christian themes and metaphors. This article presents reports of dreams and visions extracted from historical sources and grouped into 8 categories: conception, vocation, dream songs/poems, temptations and consolation, otherworld journeys, prophecies of death and destruction, gloriosus obitus (saints at death), and saints' relics. These categories were created to reflect the human life cycle and to facilitate use by other dream researchers. The distinction between dreams and visions made by the hagiographers of the time is significantly different than the contemporary distinction between dreams and visions. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Individual Differences in the Range of Sensory Modalities Experienced in Dreams.

The present study investigated the relationship between the recalled frequency of sensory modalities experienced in dreams and waking imagery abilities. Five hundred thirty-one undergraduate students completed 4 imagery ability tests and a dream recall questionnaire containing a question on the frequency of experience of the sensory modalities in dreams. A k-means cluster analysis of the Dream Sense Modality Scale indicated that the participants fell into 3 groups: the major modalities group, whose dreams were entirely visual, auditory, and kinesthetic; the all modalities group, who experienced all sense modalities in dreams; and the no modalities group, whose dreams were without sensory content. The participants' scores on the imagery tests in the 3 groups showed significant intergroup differences. The all modalities group showed the highest levels of ability in evoking vivid imagery and controlling visual imagery and the most frequent use of visual imagery compared with the other two groups. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Contextualizing Images in Dreams: More Intense After Abuse and Trauma

A contextualizing image (CI) is a powerful central image in a dream which can be seen as picturing, or providing a picture-context for, the dominant emotion of the dreamer. Thus the paradigmatic dream, I was overwhelmed by a tidal wave, contextualizes the dominant emotion of fear/terror or helplessness. This study examined the question of whether CIs, scored on a blind basis, are especially frequent and intense in persons who have suffered abuse, and in persons who have suffered a recent acute trauma.Two sets of dream data were studied. A single most recent dream was obtained from each of 306 students. The contextualizing image (CI) score measuring presence and intensity of a contextualizing image, scored on a blind basis, was higher among students who reported any abuse (physical or sexual, childhood or recent) compared to those who reported no abuse.Second, a total of 451 dreams were collected in periods after trauma from ten persons who had experienced a variety of different acute traumas. In four of the ten cases, a series of dreams before as well as immediately after trauma were available. In all four of these, the CI score was higher after trauma than before, but the difference was statistically significant in only one case. The CI scores in the ten trauma subjects overall were found to be significantly higher than the CI scores in the overall student group. In each of the ten trauma cases, the mean CI score was higher than the mean CI score of the student group. The differences were even greater, with higher t values, when the 10 trauma cases were compared with the group of students who had reported no abuse. Since the student group differed greatly from the trauma group in sex distribution, age, and other ways, an age and gender matched subgroup of the students was formed. CI scores in the trauma group were significantly higher than in this matched control group.The emotions rated as contextualized by the dream images tended towards more negative than positive emotions. Fear/terror and helplessness/vulnerability were especially prominent. However, this was true in the dreams of students who reported no abuse, as well as those of students who reported abuse and the dreams of the group who had experienced trauma. The students who reported abuse tended to picture less of the positive emotions. Only the two most severely traumatized of the traumas cases showed an unusual amount of terror and helplessness contextualized. Overall, the CI score—representing intensity of the image—differentiated the groups better than did the type of emotion.     

Client Reactions to Working With Dreams in Psychotherapy.

A questionnaire about working with dreams was given to 95 clients in ongoing psychotherapy. Results indicated that clients who discussed dreams in therapy (68%) had more positive attitudes toward dreams, higher dream recall, and more therapist encouragement for talking about dreams than clients who did not. Clients reported that therapists used more exploratory than insight or action dream-related activities. The outcome of the dream session was positively related to the therapists' encouragement of dream work and dream-related activities used. Clients who had not discussed dreams in therapy indicated that they had not because there was not enough time in sessions to work on dreams or it had never occurred to them to talk about their dreams in therapy. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Emotions in the Diary and REM Dreams of Young and Late Adulthood Women and Their Relation to Life Satisfaction.

Expanding on studies of the incidence and valence of emotions in dreams and their relationship with waking life satisfaction, home and rapid eye movement (REM) sleep dreams were collected from 30 late adulthood and 28 young women who had filled out a life satisfaction scale. Four positive and 4 negative dream emotions were self-rated. Both groups reported more emotions, with greater intensity, in home dreams than in REM dreams, particularly the older group. Regardless of age, intensity of negative emotions was lower in laboratory dreams than in home dreams, but there was no difference for positive emotions. The older women's home dreams had fewer negative emotions, with lower intensity, than did the young women's. Life satisfaction did not differ between age groups and was not significantly related to dream emotions. These results reinforce the distinction between home and laboratory dreams and question the relation between dream emotions and life satisfaction. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Neuronal Activity Preceding Directional and Nondirectional Cues in the Premotor Cortex of Rhesus Monkeys

Pre-cue activity, the neuronal modulation that precedes a predictable stimulus, was studied in the premotor cortex of three rhesus monkeys. In one condition, a directional cue dictated the timing and target of a forelimb movement. In another condition, a non-directional cue provided identical timing information but did not indicate the target. Of 501 task-related neurons recorded in premotor cortex, 168 showed pre-cue activity. The onset time of pre-cue activity varied markedly from trial to trial and cell to cell, ranging from trial initiation to 4.8 sec later. No pre-cue activity reflected the direction of limb movement; thus, the data argue against the hypothesis that pre-cue activity reflects preparation for specific limb movements. A small number of cells showed greater pre-cue activity before directional than before nondirectional cues, and this difference may reflect anticipation of the cue's directional information. However, the vast majority (84%) of neurons lacked such differences. We therefore hypothesize that most pre-cue activity reflects or contributes to a facet of behavior common to the two conditions: anticipation of the time and/or nature of events.     

Post-error recruitment of frontal sensory cortical projections promotes attention in mice

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Gene expression profiling of individual cases reveals consistent transcriptional changes in alcoholic human brain

Chronic alcohol exposure induces lasting behavioral changes, tolerance, and dependence. This results, at least partially, from neural adaptations at a cellular level. Previous genome-wide gene expression studies using pooled human brain samples showed that alcohol abuse causes widespread changes in the pattern of gene expression in the frontal and motor cortices of human brain. Because these studies used pooled samples, they could not determine variability between different individuals. In the present study, we profiled gene expression levels of 14 postmortem human brains (seven controls and seven alcoholic cases) using cDNA microarrays (46,448 clones per array). Both frontal cortex and motor cortex brain regions were studied. The list of genes differentially expressed confirms and extends previous studies of alcohol responsive genes. Genes identified as differentially expressed in two brain regions fell generally into similar functional groups, including metabolism, immune response, cell survival, cell communication, signal transduction and energy production. Importantly, hierarchical clustering of differentially expressed genes accurately distinguished between control and alcoholic cases, particularly in the frontal cortex.     

Neuronal representations of reward-predicting cues and outcome history with movement in the frontal cortex

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